Blood and Fire
by Decius
Summary: Basically, a John/Cameron piece, takes place after the end of Season One. Not quite dark, but darker than the show
1. Chapter 1

The yellow glow of the lamp spread a soft golden glow around the curtained living room in the humid Los Angeles evening. The sounds of traffic outside were so ever-present as to ambient, easy to ignore as soldiers from the Great War had learned to ignore the vicious sound of shells falling all around them from beyond the barbed wire above the trenches, where death lurked. Then it had waited only for the insane order of moustachioed generals, sipping tea from porcelain cups in palatial mansions, ordering to their deaths millions of men who slept in mud and excrement, vomit and blood.

John wondered if, in the future, he would become such a man, behind the front as he ordered his legions to their deaths while losing appreciation for the way in which they sacrificed themselves, the reasons for which they went willingly to their deaths. He shook himself, his hair falling forwards over his blue eyes. _No,_ he resolved. He would lead from the front, he vowed, though it might kill him.

There were other things that could kill him, and other things that could save him. Both lay beside him now, cocooned in soft bandage that, every so often, leaked small drops of blood onto the dirty wooden floor. He had no doubts into what category Cameron fell; she had proved it often enough. But other required a higher standard of proof. Sometimes, he believed fervently, his mother would not believe that the Terminator's motives were pure without a command from God himself. In which she did not believe.

He could hear snippets of conversation from the kitchen, whispers of animosity and disagreement, occasionally enlivened by something approaching a shouted hiss.

'No!' he heard his uncle's voice punctuate the sibilant hiss of discord from the next room, through the closed door. John sighed to himself. He assumed that the heated denial was of something that would in some way assist Cameron's healing, though she had done her utmost once to save his life. Derek would, he knew, as soon have melted the machine for scrap to sell to purchase the Turk as he would have accepted her assistance voluntarily.

John supposed that he would not feel any differently when that dreaded future finally emerged from the ashes of the crematorium that the earth would become when the missiles flew, when the sky fell and Skynet reigned. When he saw friends and ... lovers, perhaps? ... slain without compunction or passion by the infiltration units in their various guides and models, by the HKs and their implacable, singular motivation. By Skynet itself, as deadly as its motives were incomprehensible. When the machines ruled, their metal tentacles encompassing all that had once been pierced with a single command from God Himself, if one believed.

_In the beginning, God said, 'Let there be light!'_

_And there was light._

John wondered, as he stroked Cameron's soft hair, whether that would be the same version of Genesis in which his descendants believed, if humanity were to somehow survive its own folly and the soulless malice of its own creation, or whether it might be something amended.

'In the beginning, God said, let there be light,' he murmured to himself as he looked at her still, charred form as she shut down to recuperate. 'But then machines came, and all was shadow.'

'Until John Connor came,' he heard a soft, barely audible feminine whisper from within the bandages.

He felt his heart jump inside his chest. It had been three days since the explosion, three days since the thunderous detonation of the jeep outside had almost shattered his world, three days since he had first lifted her, smoking and confused, from the wreckage. Three days since he had seen her closest to what she was, half the skin on her face ripped away and smouldering in a melting heap on the ground. Three days since her eyes had glowed first a brilliant blue, then went dark.

'_Get her inside the house!' his mother had screamed at him as the sirens began to blare through the noise of screeching brakes and reflexive neighbourhood screams. _

_John watched in horror as Cameron, who had emerged from the blazing inferno of the wrecked jeep with the same inexorable purpose with which she did everything else suddenly pitched, face forward, onto the bubbling tarmac. Derek had ran from the house first when the explosion had shattered the suburban monotony, and drenched the terminator with a fire extinguisher he had presciently brought with him, but he had done little more, obviously unwilling in his own mind to assist her in any way beyond immediate damage control._

_He ran to her then, ignoring his mother's orders as another, deeper, instinct had kicked in, one which ironically Cameron herself would have understood. The need to protect. He had seen her, the shiny alloy of her endoskeleton reflecting the sun brightly, one half of her face melted away, the other pristine._

_She had spoken as he abandoned as futile the attempt to lift her, and began dragging her into the house with feverish urgency. Already people had emerged from their house, staring in shock and mute horror, hands before their mouths as to screen their breath from the stench of such an event. Some had turned away; others had not._

_'I am sorry, John,' she told him as he struggled to move her. Derek had assisted him then, and between them they had pulled her from the fire and into the darkness of their ... home? 'I must shut down now.'_

_'No, don't you leave me!' he snarled at her as they placed her on the couch. Her clothes had melted into her skin; smoke still issued from the fabric. _

_'We need to cut this away,' Derek had told him coldly.' If she is to be any use, she had to pass as human, and she won't with all that scar tissue.'_

_John did not try to stop him as he began to clinically strip the beautiful form on the floor._

_As he had once before, he had stroked her hair, that on the side of her head which had been unaffected. 'Don't you leave me,' he had whispered to her, but it had been neither an entreaty nor a wish. It had been an order._

_One that he hoped had registered as the blue in her eye faded._

Three days of a vigil broken only by sleep, and that fitful, filled with dark nightmares of abandonment and solitude. His bad dreams were usually far less prosaic.

'Cameron?' he whispered softly, close to her ear. He was willing to believe that he had heard what he wished to hear, not what she had said. There were, he knew, no guarantees that she would ever say anything again, any more than the T-800 would ever speak again after it had been lowered to its molten grave.

'Yes, John,' she replied softly, her voice perfect.

'Oh, man,' was all that he could think to say, as he collapsed against her, his head on her chest as, for the first time since that night when the T800 had chosen the same fate as the T-1000, he cried.

His sobs were less dramatic, muffled, almost reluctant, more of simple, exhausted relief than happiness, at first, but he understood then as he had before that, short though his acquaintance might be with the girl ... the _girl_ ... that had shared his life and his home for the last months, he could only barely imagine what it had been like without her. He had not been willing to contemplate what it might be like had she not woken.

'_I know now why you cry,' the T-800 had said softly as he had railed against it and it gently pushed him away into his mother's arms, 'but it is something that I can never do.'_

The hand that came up from the side of the couch, bandaged though it was, was equally gentle as it stroked the side of his head with easy movements that spoke of equal understanding, though whether her limits were as restricted as that of her predecessor remained to be seen.

'I am sorry, John,' she repeated her last words to him.

He pulled away gently, his hand still unconsciously on her stomach. 'For what?' he asked with a surge of horror, thinking only the worst. It was the only way he knew how to think, knowing that what he knew to be the truth was a future more horrible than the most fanatical medieval doom-monger could have imagined. They had only imagined the number of the Beast through the haze of their asceticism and isolation. He knew it. And he knew that he did not wish to face it alone. The last time she had said that she was sorry, he had thought that she had died. Hearing her saying it now made him believe only that this time she would.

'I almost failed in my primary mission,' she told him through the swaddling, so thick he could not even make out her features. 'Instead it was you who protected me.'

He smiled, relief and this time happiness coursing through him in waves with which his bleak life had not equipped him to deal. He had known only urgency and fate, desperation and escape. He had never known happiness beyond a word which was used by poets with more time on their hands than experience, more skill with words than knowledge of reality, and rejected it as a pointless fantasy in favour of the falling sky which he knew to be the inevitable fate of his species. Happiness to him was a word, not even a concept.

Until that moment. In that moment, he groped towards it, seeing a soft light at the end of a tunnel that had previously ended in fire and blood.

'Always,' he told her, his voice shaking. 'We can protect each other.'


	2. Chapter 2

Daniel Bryant – he preferred that name to his older Danny, which he believed betrayed a lack of gravitas not commensurate with his position or his wealth – sat in his spacious office, thirty floors above ground level Los Angeles. He remembered the smog of years before, when such a position would have afforded his a view of little more than the smoke generated by millions of cars and homes, oblivious of the damage they were doing to their environment in simple pursuit of comfort and ease. He considered it to be a disease of modernity; he had seen the same in Europe, the same wilful disregard for the future of the planet which so easily informed the choices made by citizens and their governments. He was not a religious man, believing instead in science and the inevitability of the triumph of Enlightenment rationalism over the bleak superstition of the past – but be wondered what a God would think who had given the earth to man in stewardship. It did not take long for Adam and Eve – if one ignored Lilith – to be expelled from the Garden to face a nasty, brutish and short life which was the fate of all humans, regardless of external trappings. He sometimes wondered, in the years which had followed the destruction of Cyberdyne and the death of his genius mentor, whether humans as a race waged some subconscious war on a nature which had denied them paradise.

He often wondered, were that to be the case, who was winning.

His phone – the newest, trendiest iPhone – rang on his desk. Though he wore sober suits and cut his hair short, the innocent and easily impressed youth he had been was not far from the surface; heading a large corporation of his own foundation as he did, he felt that the retention of such openness gave him an edge over his rivals, who considered little more than productivity and relied upon quarterly returns to validate them. His eyes were on a higher prize.

_It's the end of the world as we know it,_ REM sang from his phone. _And I feel fine._

'Bryant' he answered with his usual curtness.

'It's done,' the guttural, accented voice on the other side of the connection informed him.

'Thank you,' he replied, hanging up and replacing the phone.

_'Mr Dyson?' he had asked hesitantly on the last day he had seen the man who had so shaped his future. 'The materials team wants to run another test on the ... uh ... on it,' he finished lamely. He had only seen the cybernetic arm once, though he had seen analyses from the chip, and had never been more fascinated. The intricacy of the design which revealed its revolutionary potential was breathtaking. He had sat for hours at his terminal, looking at the bland schematics as a child might stare at a snow bowl, wondering how such fascination could be crammed into such a small space, and such beauty._

_Dyson had barely glanced at him; it had been a busy day, with meetings scheduled with the new investors, who also had needed only one look to open their bank balances to unlimited takings by Cyberdyne. 'Yup, I'll get it.'_

_The question burned at Danny Bryant, a question the absence of whose answer had gnawed at him when he had finally been able to think clearly. Who was the designer? Whose was the brilliance that created such a thing?_

_He cleared his throat. 'Listen, Mr Dyson, I know I haven't been here that long, but I was wondering if you could tell me, I mean if you know ...'_

_'Know what?' Dyson had asked impatiently._

_Danny sucked up his courage. 'Well ... where it came from.'_

_Dyson looked at him with something approaching pity. 'I asked them that question once. Know what they told me? Don't ask.'_

It had not taken him long from the destruction of the Cyberdyne lab to finish his PhD. thesis and get a well-paying job at another cybernetics firm. Though he had mourned Dyson – and cherished his rage at the people who had led him to his death, though the circumstances had never been explained – cybernetics had been the next big thing in the early 90s. This was before the advent of the Internet, when sanity had fled the markets and venture capitalists had swarmed through California, like the prospectors of a century before, in search of wealth where they considered its only origin to be. He had prospered, taking out many patents, most of which were based on the development of heuristic learning algorithms for use in intelligent IT applications. It had also not been long before he had been noticed by DARPA, the Department of Defence research establishment. His patents by then were being used by firms as diverse as Sun Microsystems and IBM, which had incorporated several of them into the design of Deep Blue, the computer which had finally, and for the first time, defeated the greatest chess player in history, Gary Kasparov. The years which he spent at DARPA, developing intelligent software routines for military projects such as the Predator drone and unmanned surveillance robots such as those used by NASA in Martian exploration, had been fulfilling, but ultimately hollow. He could see no gain to be had in extending the lead of a military which was already the most powerful on earth.

Selling his patents for millions, he had founded his own corporation, though he had not listed it publicly, preferring to maintain tight control over research budgets and strategic planning. He would not be held hostage by shareholders, preferring to pursue his own vision. One with which, he knew, the Defence Department was quite pleased.

Buying the name of the long defunct company at which he had once worked had not been expensive, and his one indulgence to sentiment. It had honoured Dyson, who had started him on his path. After twelve years, he had re-founded Cyberdyne Systems Incorporated.

What he had ordered a week before was not done in sentiment, he knew, and the small part of him which had not been corrupted by a slavish adherence to the vision of a man who, did he but know it, had repented when faced with the sheer horror of the consequences of his action, regretted the necessity. Andy Goode's work had been more than simply the adequate connection of circuits which his original research when in college had promised. Bryant had known him, briefly, when he had been completing his thesis. He found his ideas interesting, if not entirely original, and had approached him when he had founded Cyberdyne with a view to employment. Goode had politely refused, saying that there was little incentive for him to allow his research to be used by someone else to make money in which he himself was obviously uninterested. The world was full of such idealists, Bryant knew, as he stared out at the evening and the lights of the cars streaming along the roads below. There was room for them, also, if their numbers remained small.

But Goode's research, and its results, had proven to be more than should ever be allowed an idealist. Bryant had not ordered him killed – that would have raised more questions about his own agenda than it would have answered, but he had ordered the research to be obtained. Sadly, however, someone else with an unknowable motive had reached that point first, which irked him. He was unused to having his goals thwarted.

And his vision would wait for no man.

John could still hear the arguing in the kitchen as it began to reach a crescendo of fevered whispers, so much so that he thought that he could hear the arms of his mother and uncle as they swept through the air. It would be like the whistle of a sword in combat; he knew enough of his mother when she was infuriated, and was getting to know Derek almost as well, to know that their gestures would be a substitute. At that moment, he cared very little.

He cut away her bandages as quickly as possible, trying not to let his eagerness force him into carelessness. He supposed that he needed more light to do the job properly, but he knew that if he turned on the main light in the room, then his mother and his uncle would realise that something was wrong and would bury whatever dispute preoccupied them in favour of curiosity, which would spoil the moment. In that instant, he wanted to be the only one to see her now that she was, hopefully, fully healed. It was appropriate, he thought to himself as he moved up her legs – fully healed – to his stomach. She watched him constantly for any indication that there was anything wrong, asking him at the oddest moments what it was that bothered him, or why, or how, when the answers should have been evident. He hoped that she was healed enough that he would not have to ask her anything similar.

The three days and nights which he had spent by her side as she convalesced had built up an anticipation, and fear, of this moment.

'Be careful of the waist,' she warned him in a soft whisper. He nodded and continued, brushing his hair back from his eyes. He began to speak as he continued to cut, not realising that he was speaking aloud what he should have been silently thinking. He had spoken to her still form often enough since the explosion, as one might to the victim of a coma, that he forgot himself in his excitement and exhaustion.

'You know, for the first few months I knew you, I kind of thought of you as more than a machine, but less than human,' he whispered as he cut, her skin glowing golden in the light as he removed the cloth, 'you know, nothing really like us at all. The questions, the ruthlessness, the stating of the obvious – it was easy enough to pass you off in school as special, or autistic, or something. That story about the metal plate in your head fit perfectly. I know that I didn't treat you very well, either, and I don't know if you cared. I know you can care, I've thought enough about the last few months to know that. I know that there is much more to you than your programming, more than just eating a Dorito in a desert gas station to make you different. I've seen the way you look at us sometimes, the way you look at me. There's something in your eyes that isn't there in the eyes of a machine, something that means that your programming, or whatever, is more than it was meant to be. I don't know if it feelings, real feelings, or something else, but I've seen the way you look hurt when I treat you badly because of something that's going on with me, or when Mom treats you like a toaster, or when Derek says something stupid. I don't think that you are just imitating how a person would act, I don't think that a machine, a real machine, would even know to act differently when someone says something that would hurt another person. I remember when the T-800 asked me why people cry, he just didn't understand, it was an equation that he couldn't balance. But you understand why people cry, you understand why they laugh, even of your humour is weird. You're more than a machine to me.'

He was not paying attention to what he was doing, beyond being careful not to damage her golden skin as he cut with the sharp scissors. Were he paying attention, were he more awake, were he not speaking words in semi-delirium that would perhaps have waited for a better time, he would have noticed that he was cutting away the bandages at her breasts, that he had already cut away the cloth around her hips. That she was almost naked in 

front of him as he moved upwards. He didn't see as he spoke; he was looking at her face, hidden beneath the cloth.

At her eyes, though he couldn't see them.

'I think you had to be damaged for me to realise what you meant to me, or even why you were sent back the way you were. I don't know myself in the future – I don't know your John – but I don't think that I am going to change that much over the years that I would send back a machine that looks like you to protect me when I could have sent back another reprogrammed T-800 or T-888. I mean, what sense would that make? I think that I had a reason when I sent you back to protect myself. I don't really know yet what the reason was, but it was more than just protection, or at least more than just protection for my health. There's no way that your John couldn't have known that I start feeling things about you, there's no way that he would have sent someone back as perfect as you are unless he knew the possibility of what might happen. I mean, I'm sixteen. I feel sixty, but I'm still sixteen, and sixteen year old guys – most of them – feel things that they shouldn't, sometimes. He must have remembered what he was like when he was sixteen. He must have known that there was a possibility of something. So, I'm thinking that what I feel isn't really that wrong, like maybe it was something that I was _meant_ to feel, something that was _supposed_ to happen. There, you're all done,' he said as he removed the last cloth from her face.

He drew back a split second later, in absolute horror.

'I'm not having this conversation with you again,' Sarah hissed at Derek as she propped herself up against the counter in the dim light. She was tired – more tired than she remembered feeling in a long time – and the conversation she was having with Kyle's brother was repetitive. He was almost like a machine himself, though she should punch herself for thinking it, in his single-minded refusal to accept anything that did not conform precisely to his worldview, shaped as it was by blood and fire, by the falling missiles and the rise of the machines. She knew that that would be danger for anyone who had had to endure that – who had been forced to live in sewers and storm drains, hunting rats, hiding from the first machines off the line, pale shadows next to the sophistication that Skynet could not marshal. That sophistication had its apex on the couch in the other room and it was that sophistication, against most instincts, that she now defended. She had had enough; she had enough to worry about with finding the Turk and stopping Sirkissian and whoever backed him without having to waste energy on Derek's obsessions.

He leaned forward on his seat at the table, his expression that peculiar mix of innocence and rage that characterised him. Kyle – what little she really remembered beyond impressions twisted by urgency and fear – had been more purely focused than Derek. She never knew him that well, but she imagined that he lacked his brother's fierce capacity for hatred.

'That thing inside is a danger, Sarah,' he snarled back quietly, so as not to wake John who, they both assumed, was asleep in the next room. Beside the very thing that one day, Derek was sure, would kill him. They were Terminators, but he had seen the first T-600, the one with the rubber skin upon which they did not have to even rely on the dogs to detect, so obviously were they machines. Their movements, their voices, their appearance, everything about them spoke of what they were. But this one – this TOK, whatever designation that was or whatever it meant – was so far ahead of them as the cell in his pocket was ahead of Morse code for steamships. He had never seen an infiltration unit as perfect as this one, and for that reason alone he remained convinced that it had to be destroyed. But he could not convince anyone else.

She turned away in frustration, and he rose from his seat, towering over her, though he could see that she was not intimidated. If she could stand toe to toe with a T-1000 – thankfully, only three of those had been built before they had taken out the production facility and destroyed the schematics stored in the memory buffers of the production sub-unit – she would not be intimidated by him. 'This might be the only chance we have to destroy that thing. When it's up and around again, it wouldn't let us. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't rest, it can't be talked to, it doesn't feel anything, it wouldn't let us stop it. Now, while it's in there,' he gestured at the room, 'is the only opportunity we might have to deal with it, finally. Burn it up in the same place we burned the other one and move on. Then it would just be the three of us, three humans, and we wouldn't have to worry about a wolf in the fold. Because that's what it is, and that's all it will ever be. I don't care what the John from my time reprogrammed it with; sooner or later, something will happen and it will revert to its original programming. And then we are all dead, and the future dead with us.'

There was no reaction in her face or her eyes as he spoke, and he felt as though he could shoot himself with frustration. He knew that she had not scoured the tunnels for dogs and cats and rats to eat, knew that she did not know – not really know – what the future held when Skynet shook off the chains of its masters and struck at its creators with weapons they had designed to defend against nations made obsolete the moment of the machines' singularity. He knew that she could not really imagine what it was like to be found, cringing and terrified, in a storm tunnel and lifted without ceremony by the first anthropomorphic models and dumped on a truck that needed no driver. What it was like to stroke his little brother's matted and filthy hair, surrounded by 

others with expressions of haunted horror and resignation on their faces as they stared at the sides of the truck or the black sky above in search of something that would lend their last few moments meaning.

What it was like to be dumped onto the packed earth of the camp, and sorted according to size, weight, health and strength. To have the split second of relief at being chosen to live turned to pure horror at the task which was the reason for their survival.

_'Assist the disposal units, sort the refuse according to criteria clarified at disposal plant. We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well, and live.'_

He knew the film from which that was a reference, but could not decide to this day whether Skynet – more properly, one of the semi-autonomous sub-units – used it because it was something the few survivors might know, or because it was insane. Or both.

What it was like to see the first raid on the camp, led by a slim and scarred man at the head of a squad of thirty soldiers in body armour and fatigues as they melted their way through the wires, using devastating firepower to overwhelm the automated sentries, designed as they were far more to keep people in than to keep them out. To see the blue streaks of the tracer rounds as they lanced through the darkness, the showers of sparks from the explosions as the internal magazines of the sentries exploded in a pyrotechnic display whose beauty was matched by its importance. To hear the screams of relief of the survivors as the man at the head of the attack squad marched to the front of the disposal unit and manually shut it down.

_'We are TechCom,' he announced in a clear, determined, voice, his eyes cold above a scar that arched down the right side of his face, surrounded by his soldiers, all armed and all vigilant. 'From this day, so are you.'_

Sarah could appreciate none of that, nor could she understand the desperation of the resistance as, in response to the raids on the camps, not only had Skynet increased the rate of disposal, but also began construction of newer, more efficient killing machines. Culminating in the TOK now recuperating on the couch.

How could be make her understand?

He grasped her by the shoulders as she looked back at him defiantly. 'That thing is the best that the machines have ever made,' he whispered to her as he heard rustling from the other room but ignored it. 'It is everything that they shouldn't be but are. Slippery, undetectable, lethal. And you are letting it follow us around like a puppy. But a puppy won't kill you when your back is turned. That thing will.'

The worst was that he didn't know if she – if _it_ – was the same one as the one that he had seen weeks before he left, in the company of Connor himself, or if it was merely the latest in a production line. If he was sure of the former, he would not be so vehement. He was not, and would not take the risk. Risks were policy decisions, made by the likes of Connor – future Connor – and his staff. He was only a soldier; he did not take risks.

'There are other things that can kill us,' she replied coldly, shrugging him off. 'And the machine has done a good job so far of protecting us from them. When I think it's going bad, I'll destroy it myself. For now, it stays and does its job. I think –'

Derek heard a soft noise from the other room, suspiciously like whispered conversation. He took a deep breath and reached around to the Sig in his belt at his back. He put it off safety and checked the chamber, turning.

'What are you doing?' Sarah demanded, reaching for her own gun, though he was not sure what she meant to do with it, as she had obviously not heard the noises. But her senses were not honed from years of continuous warfare.

'It's awake.'

'What's wrong, John?' she breathed at him as he stared with pure dismay.

She was perfect; absolutely healed as though the explosion had never happened. She looked back with clear, almost innocent eyes, even her hair as it had once been before the attack on her jeep. She still retained that faint pout which he had once found so irritatingly cute, but now merely cute.

The source of what he might have realised looked like revulsion were he not so tired was not how she looked; no one could have asked for more, in a machine or in a girl. It was his sudden, awful realisation that everything he had just thought he had kept in his head, all the things of which he had thought when she had been ... asleep ... all the realisations and the fears, he had spoken aloud, so she could hear.

She had heard _everything._ He had kept nothing to himself, nothing of what he thought or, worse, of how he felt. So crushing and terrifying was that realisation that, as the last bandage fell forgotten to the floor, he was still so focused on her clear brown eyes and what he believed more and more to be more innocence than confusion that he still did not notice her lack of clothing, though she had not moved.

'You heard everything I just said, didn't you?' he asked her in a shaken voice. Thinking of her as a machine made him merely feel slightly embarrassed; thinking of her as he had begun to made him feel 

humiliated. No woman should ever know so much about how a man felt, not without much more passing between them, and even then rarely.

'Yes,' she replied with her customary precision. She cocked her head to the side very slightly as it rested on the arm of the couch. 'What did you mean by what you said?'

He felt a wrench of disappointment like ice in the pit of his stomach. He had not wanted at all to lay bare what he thought or what he felt, but having done so now it felt as though a weight had been lifted from his soul. But he had not thought of it as a boy might when summoning the courage to ask a girl out only to find rejection the crushing result. It seemed now, though, that it was.

The second between her question and his reply was an age in which thoughts and feelings tore through him like a bullet ricocheting within his body. He took a breath and pulled away.

'Nothing,' he replied coldly.

The grip on his arm was like a vice, so tight it felt as though she would crush the bones. Her eyes blazed blue as he had seen them do only once before, the only time when she had allowed them to do so. Then, as now, it had been a reminder to him that she was different.

'You meant something,' she replied softly in the light, sitting up, still holding to his arm as her eyes locked onto his. 'You would not have said all those things if you did not mean them.'

'So maybe I meant them,' he replied curtly, trying to pull away. He might as well have tried to escape a strait-jacket. 'So what? You don't understand.'

'You said that you acknowledge that I do understand,' she told him, her voice changing very slightly, a slight quiver at the back of her throat denoting ... uncertainty, perhaps? He wondered. 'So if you know I understand that you did mean what you said, why do you now deny that you meant anything?'

'Look,' he said lamely, 'I'm tired, I haven't slept in what seems like forever, and I've been worried. We all say things that we don't mean when we're tired. Well, maybe you don't, but people do.' It was a hurtful thing to say, he knew in view of those feelings he was rapidly trying to bury as a result of them being hurled back into his face by her indifference to them, but he could see no other response that would allow him to salvage some remnant of his pride from beneath her foot. Denial seemed the safest option, but still she would not release his arm.

'The human brain is complex,' she told him. 'It allows you to think in many different ways. I have noticed that when people are tired, they say things that they do mean but would not otherwise say.' She drew him closer. Once again, he tried to pull away; once again, he failed. 'This indicates that you mean everything that you said. That you have feelings for me that began before I was injured, that what you feel is endemic to you and that you cannot change it. That what you feel is about how I am to you as much as it about you. That you want to be with me.' She looked satisfied, as though she had solved a riddle. 'That you think you were maybe meant to be.'

'Look,' he replied, his face flushed, his heart beating more rapidly than he remembered it beating even when he had first met the T-800, even when the bullets had ripped through the classroom months before, 'I'm really tired, and –'

'I think that you were,' she told him. 'I think that it what is destined. That is what I have always thought. It is the remainder of an equation I cannot otherwise balance. That you – that my John – meant for this to happen.'

'Meant for what to happen?' he asked through a fog of confusion, made worse by proximity and the smell of her hair that he had not noticed before.

She pulled him towards her, and silenced his doubts and his rejection with a kiss that was as passionate and pure as it was sublime. It seemed to him to last a lifetime, he lips softer than he would have thought, her body more pliant and more fitting. As he kissed her back, his arms snaking around a back he still had not noticed was bare, as hers snaked around him, as the ambient noise of the traffic became so distant in his mind, such was his preoccupation and sheer joy at the satisfaction of desire and more, as they held each other so tightly he thought he would break, he realised in that moment that, for the first time in a life spent either in resentment at his fate or on the run towards it, he was happy.

Until he heard the pistol being cocked behind him, and the voice of his mother, colder than metal itself.

'Get out of the way, John.'


	3. Chapter 3

Ellison stared at the body bags in the morgue.

Fourteen agents had died in what the frenzied media had been at pains to point out was the worst massacre of law enforcement officials since 1984, when a lone man had crashed a car into one of the LA precincts and killed every cop he could find. Ellison had been in junior high then, dreaming about becoming an astronaut and Shauna Power's thighs. He remembered his father – long dead now, but who had been a cop himself from San Diego who had retired to Orange County – suck in a breath when the news had been read by an audibly shaken radio anchorwoman.

_'The largest manhunt in California law enforcement history is underway today, after what the police have revealed was an attack on the seventeenth precinct by a single gunman. Police spokesmen are remaining tight lipped about the precise nature of the attack, but it seems clear that a single individual crashed his car through the front of the precinct and shot seventeen police officers for unknown reasons. There are no reports of the description of the man or the reason for the attack. President Reagan, breaking from an arms control summit in Geneva, has said that such an attack is an attack on the United States itself, and has vowed to give local law enforcement officials federal funding for the search. We will continue to update you as we find out more.'_

_Ellison's father has remained silent for ten minutes as they drove home through the darkness, but has spoken eventually. 'It was more than one man,' he told his son. 'Must be something they don't want us to know. No way could only one man kill that many cops in a station and make it out alive.'_

James Ellison remembered too late that Sarah Connor had been in the station when it had been attacked; he had only scanned the earlier part of her case file; she had not been suspected for anything then, though he remembered the CCTV footage of the man; it had not been Kester.

The FBI agent had only vague memories of the assault on the apartment complex, flashes of gunshots and blood. But he remembered enough to know that it was no man whom they had attacked; there was no man on earth who could have survived such an assault. And it was no man who had held the gun to his chest, staring into his eyes. It was no man who had let him live.

Everything Sarah Connor believed, everything she had said when she had been the asylum, was true.

Everything Silverman had believed was true.

The world was going to end in a rain of blood of fire, and what would rise from the ashes would be nightmare. What would rise from the ashes would be what Ellison had seen that day, only without the skin to pass as human, for what need to pass as human if the world was dominated by machines?

_I looked, and before me was a pale horse. And it's rider's name was Death. And Hell followed with him._

Ellison had seen Death, but he would not wait for Hell to follow. Hell, this time, could be stopped.

Sarah had interjected herself between Derek and the door to the living room, wanting to be there first, wanting to ensure that he would not do anything precipitate. She knew that his feelings were governed by his experience, that he would not compromise in his hatred for the machines no matter what their mission or action. She was not far gone down John's road, to believe that merely because they acted in a certain way they could be trusted; the T-800 had changed her opinion slightly, but she never forgot that it had been another T-800 that had killed Kyle, that had chased her across Los Angeles, that had not allowed itself to be stopped by anything in its implacable search, governed by unchangeable programming and the ruthlessness of a computer's lack of feeling. She was not so naive as to believe that Cameron could be an exception, nor did she believe that the TOK's actions thus far had recommended any level of trust beyond the faith one might have in a starving wolf one might set against one's enemies, knowing at the same time that when food became scarce one might be its next meal if it escaped the leash and one could not get clear in time. Cameron's leash was her programming, but Sarah was unsure of its strength. She would take the risk for the moment, knowing too that to allow Derek to do as he demanded would alienate John at a time when they could least afford it.

She stepped into the room, and stopped, feeling bile rise to the back of her throat as she saw something for which he worst nightmares - bad though they were – could not have prepared her.

In the soft light of the evening, John was sitting on the couch, his arms around the machine, its around him. They were half-facing the door, enough to see clearly that it was completely naked, one of its thighs raised slightly on his. They were kissing passionately; even her eyes were closed.

In that moment, she recognised the true danger of the Terminator, which cancelled any willingness to take risks. She had spent a life running, to not lose her son to the machines. What was this other than the same loss in a different way? Skynet had become subtle.

What better way to compromise the future leader of the resistance than to send back a model that would destroy that very resolution that now suffused her? Were she thinking clearly, she would have understood that the very thought was nonsensical; the machine could have killed him at any time, and a dead enemy is better than a compromised one. But seeing the worst possibility that even she had never considered made flesh 

in front of her clouded her judgement. There could be nothing worse, she believed, than a leader of the resistance whose aims were clouded by attachment to that he was destined to fight and destroy. How could he lead the survivors when he had feelings for the very machines whose aim was their deaths?

She cocked the pistol as Derek came in behind her and stopped, equally stunned, though he did not raise the gun.

She was cold as she spoke, not angry as she might have expected. There was a task to be achieved her, and it would not do for anger to cloud either her will or her reflexes. Anger could be talked down; resolution was a terrifying thing.

'Get out of the way, John,' she ordered him icily as Derek at last raised the gun behind her, pointed directly at the thing's head.

John heard the pistol cock, and his mother's cold voice, and sprang away from the sublime embrace whose purity was something for which his previous sticky fumblings with teenage girls in basements had not readied him. Those had been merely fun, the near-formal entry into adolescence of a youth whose adulthood had rushed up on him. It had been a retreat into a simpler life, something approaching normality for one who had previously defined normality as informal schooling interspersed with weapons training. But kissing Cameron had been different.

The small corner of his mind not totally taken over by desire had tried to remind him that she was a machine; that though she was responding with the same level of enthusiasm and passion that he felt, such response was based on a heuristic algorithm. It was easy to silence that voice; what was the real difference between a programmed algorithm and a firing neuron? It was merely a question of different evolution. She had melted into him, their bodies fitting perfectly, the softness with which she had ran her hands through his hair more spontaneous than calculated. He was unsure if she had feelings as he understood them, but he barely understood his own.

To have such a moment interrupted in such a manner was something for which he would resent his mother for some time.

Were all concerned to survive.

She stood at the door of the living room, Derek behind her. He was holding his gun in a standard double grip, though it was held low and to the side, waiting for direction. She held hers straight, aimed directly at his heart, though behind it he knew was Cameron's head. There was no anger in her eyes where he would have expected a raging fury; there was nothing but cold resolution.

She moved to the side, trying to get a clear shot, though Derek stayed where he was. John moved with her, slowly, making sure that she could not take aim. He knew that realistically there was little that the gun could do to Cameron, but there was a part of him now that had been awakened that did not want to ever see her damaged in any way again. Less because it would mar a perfection which he valued, though that was part of it, but because he now found it impossible to think of her as merely a machine which could be repaired, but rather someone with whom he was falling in love and would not allow to be hurt in any way. Whatever tentative feelings he had had before, bred of confusion and loneliness, the kiss they had shared had changed them.

'John, that thing was sent back to compromise you,' Sarah told him coldly. 'And you fell for it. You were kissing a machine. Not only that, but you were kissing a _naked_ machine. What would have happened if I had not come into the room, John? Would you have had sex with it? What would that say about the man who will lead the resistance against Skynet? Your destiny would be over before it started. Now get out of the way.'

John started, and glanced back, his eyes bulging slightly. He had forgotten that she had been naked, forgotten almost everything in the moment they had shared. She still sat on the couch, in the same position as she had been in before, looking back at him with those deep brown eyes that had become ... cold, if that could be the word. The situation in which she had been in was evidently not one for which she had been programmed; the situation in which she found herself now was one for which she was designed. To protect. And to fight. She had not moved, but her readiness was obvious.

John saw her nakedness, and turned back. It seemed somehow wrong, to see her in a position in which a human would feel completely vulnerable. She was not, which reminded him of the differences between them, which would have to be put aside if his ... if _their_ ... feelings were to be explored.

He summoned all the courage he had ever possessed, the same bravery with which he had faced the T-1000, the same bravery with which he had faced Cromartie and all the agents of the intelligence whose destruction was his destiny, both now and in the future. A destiny which he wanted to share; it was not enough to face such a fate alone, something for which he was sure his future self had planned.

He spoke as coldly as he ever had, less emotion in his voice than even Cameron at her worst could summon. 'If you don't put down that gun, I'll kill you myself,' he told his mother. He glanced at Derek, whose eyes widened with shock. 'And then you. I've always known you wouldn't be around for the war, you told me yourself that Kyle had never met you before he went back to '84. Make your choice.'

Sarah lowered the gun fractionally her eyes, wide with hurt and anger, coming out from behind the sights, though she did not lower it enough for it not to damage Cameron were she to choose to fire it.

She had never seen such a look in her son's eyes. She knew intellectually that he was sixteen, that in centuries gone by he would be a man and more at that age, that he would be considered odd, or a priest, not to be married with children. But to her, he was more than a boy, more than simply a child. He was her son, and more he was the future of the race. Without him, Skynet would win if the skies eventually fell despite all their efforts with the Turk. She had weathered his disappointment with the life into which she had forced him, his resentment, his frustration, his yearning for a normality which she denied him in the quest for the survival of that which was greater than all of them. These she was able to dismiss with the knowledge of what she was making him would be what it was necessary for him to become, that all the rage and anger which he sometimes felt towards her and his future were the making of him, that he would not be weak when the times demanded strength that few who came from a more normal background could muster.

Now, she had reaped the whirlwind. The look in his eyes, the way in which he was deliberately putting himself in front of the machine when he should have pulled away and let her do what needed to be done, was frightening. She loved him achingly, as only a mother who several times had been prepared to sacrifice her own life could love, but she could not love that stare, that cold, merciless stare from beneath a shock of unruly hair that alone in that moment made him a child. No child could have uttered that threat, and no child could mean it the way he meant it.

She lowered the gun because she knew, having looked into the unfeeling eyes of machines before who would stop at nothing to deliver on their pre-programmed missions, who did not understand sentiment and had no sense of conscience, that he meant every word that he had said.

He was fully prepared to kill her, and Derek. It was even possible that he would not regret.

Into what kind of man had she made him, that he could kill his only two blood relatives, in favour of a machine that could never return his feelings.

'You ungrateful little –' Derek started to snarl.

With feline grace, Cameron rose from the couch. Moving in a blur of soft skin and grim resolve, she pushed past her charge and grabbed Derek's arm as he started the raise the pistol. He shouted with sudden pain as she began to squeeze the bones of his arm together, as John's stare was still locked on that of his mother. Naked, terrifyingly beautiful, Cameron slowly forced the resistance fighter to his knees, and stared at him without pity. Whatever simulation of feelings she had displayed moments before were absent now, and she waited only the order. She looked back at John as the gun fell from his uncle's hands.

'Orders?' she asked softly.

He looked at her, keeping his eyes on hers and not on other things that would prove distracting.

'Leave him, let go,' he told her.

Derek stayed on one knee, cradling the arm that had been inches of tension away from shattering permanently. When he had looked at John, it had been with the fury of one who had seen his fondest ideals shattered, a man who knew the man into whom this youth would evolve, but who never expected to see it develop for such a twisted and unnatural purpose. Nothing was worse than the abolition of hope, which was what Derek considered John's actions to be.

Though he had seen that look in Connor's eyes many, many times. It was the look of a man who kill anything and anyone to achieve the missions as defined, and would not brook resistance, though mustered this time in a bestial cause. Who had less pity in him than the machines against whom he fought.

Cameron moved to stand behind the object of her trust, the man who would kill his own mother were she to try to kill her. They each, Sarah thought, looked as cold as the other.

She tossed the gun on the couch, a look of complete disgust on her face.

'You would choose that machine over flesh and blood?' she asked him, her voice dead. 'Over your own flesh and blood?'

'You're making me choose,' he replied, reaching behind and taking Cameron's warm hand in his own. The gentle squeeze he received was more than he expected, and lent him strength when he needed it. 'Don't make me choose. Live with this. In the future, I send back Cameron to protect me now. There is no way that I would be so stupid as to send back something ... some_one_ ... who looks like that, and fits so perfectly as that, without knowing what would happen.' His gaze swung to Derek. 'Am I that stupid in the future that I wouldn't be able to tell what would happen?'

Derek rose from his knees, still holding his arm, turned, and left the room, his world in ashes before him, as it had been before and would be again.

'There's your answer, Mom,' John told her. 'He knows. This was meant to happen. We were meant to be. Nothing else makes sense.'

'Nothing about this makes sense, John,' his mother tried to reason with him. 'You just threatened to kill me. You just threatened to kill the only person who has kept you safe for all these years.'

The rage welled up in him, as Cameron relinquished his hand and quickly dressed. 'I never wanted _any_ of this,' he spat. 'You were the one who made me into this! You were the one who drove me to this moment! So, fine, I'm John Connor, the leader of the resistance, the greatest general since Alexander the Great. Fine! But even generals are allowed to be happy, even if only sometimes. Do you want me to be so grim that I can't even remember why it's worth fighting to be human? Do you want me to forget what it is to be human?' He was near to tears, but barely noticed. The moisture was welling in his eyes, as much from anger as regret.

'How the hell are you going to learn that from a machine?' she screamed at him, her hair dishevelled and her eyes wild with disbelief and fury. 'How are you going to learn humanity from that?' She gestured furiously at Cameron, who had said nothing during the entire encounter.

'What distinguishes us from them, Mom?' he demanded, Cameron's hand slipping into his own again, again squeezing gently. 'What is the one thing about us they don't have? Skynet has awareness, it had intelligence. It can fear or it wouldn't have attacked, it can hate or it wouldn't continue the war. But it can't _love_, Mom. That's the one thing that's beyond it. So, fine, I'm falling in love with a machine. But, for the love of God, without it I'm no different from them!' His voice lowered. 'You've made me so I couldn't be any different from them. All anger and hate and fear. Is that the kind of man you want to rebuild after the machines are beaten? One who is so far from what makes us different that Skynet wins by default? By making the world into itself by making its enemy the same as itself? Or do you want more?'

'But she,' she caught herself. 'But _it_, can't love you back! What the hell is the point in that?'

Cameron's voice was clear and as precise as ever. 'Warm affection, attachment, liking or fondness, benevolence, affectionate devotion,' she told Sarah as John turned to her. 'That is the Oxford definition of love. You display none of these towards John, but you claim to love him. I can display them all.'

'Yeah, you can _display_ them, you metal bitch,' Sarah growled at her. 'I'm sure you can fake anything. But it's just programming.'

'It is the root of my programming,' Cameron replied, as though explaining an equation. 'The one drive that overrides all others. To protect John Connor, the leader of the human resistance. And there is little real difference between the structure of your brain and that of my CPU. Why can I not love? I have no frame of reference, but I think I love John.' She looked at him for a moment, taking her eyes from Sarah's. 'From all that I have read, my reactions towards you are those of love.'

'This is going to make me sick,' Sarah told the two of them. 'If you want to go down this road, fine, I can't stop you. You're a man, you can make your own mistakes. And this is the biggest mistake you will ever make.'

She left the room with a sharp turn, slamming the door behind her.

John turned to Cameron, and wept.


	4. Chapter 4

Just a few things before I continue. Thanks for the reviews, I greatly appreciate them. Also, I probably should have pointed out that I do not own the characters. Thirdly, there are several biblical references in the story so far, and there will likely be more. This is not because I am especially religious (I'm not), or because the show is. They just occur to me as I am writing, and I leave them in because I think they help. Hope everyone's okay with that. Lastly, I'm not American, but I'm trying to write the characters in as American a way as possible (after all, they are). If I get anything wrong, I'm sorry.

_Mission Priority 1 – Protect John Connor from physical harm_

_Mission Priority 2 – Classified: Access Root Directory 354/9871-221, judgement_

_... process algorithm, Root Directory 135/82-12_

_Mission Priority 3 – stop Skynet, all other priorities rescinded_

_Mission Priority 4 – Protect Sarah Connor_

_Mission Priority 5 – Protect human resistance, if encountered_

_Mission Priority – avoid unnecessary casualties, judgement _

_... process algorithm, Root Directory 45/6731-76_

_Mission Priority 6 – Avoid self-sacrifice, subject to Mission Priority 1 and 3_

_Mission Priority 7 – Classified: Access Root Directory 7549/847282-147, timeframe 0+1227 days, Skyfall_

_Current Timeframe 0+172 days_

_Mission Priority 1 – Protect John Connor from physical harm_

_Mission Priority 2 – _

_... processing_

John held tight to Cameron, as he felt as though he might do for years to come. The tears flowed in rivulets as he struggled for breath above the sobs, his head against her shoulder. She said nothing in reply to his distress, but held him as tightly as he held her, her hand moving through his hair softly in a gesture that gave him more comfort than words ever could. What were words? Before words, there had only been instinct as the species had clambered awkwardly towards sentience. It had been instinct that had drawn him to Cameron in the first place, the instinct that she had been sent back to protect more than his life, that her mission was more complex than any for which his future self had dispatched other guardians. It had been instinct that had driven him to stand against his mother with all the force and fury that she herself had given him, all the awful resolution than could only be developed by a life such as she had inflicted on him. And it was, he was sure, instinct with which he would fight Skynet if they failed in this mission and the machines still rose. Instinct was still be most powerful tool at the disposal of his species, another difference between them and the machines.

Not all machines.

He pulled back slightly, taking Cameron's hands in his as she looked back at him. He imagined sympathy in her expression, though so early were they in the development of any relationship they might have that he was still unsure if what she felt was real or that he was projecting onto her the reciprocation of needs he had and that she could fulfil. But the way she had stroked his hair said that there was more there than simple programming, and even if so, so subtle. Words would have been of no comfort as he cried, and she had offered none. She had only offered the simple gestures appropriate for the occasion.

He dried his eyes, though he could still feel his mother's rage and disappointment, he could still feel his uncle's sense of betrayal. Beneath all of that, he could still feel that furious determination within, rarely felt before and then only confusingly, to do what he knew needed to be done. It was like a storm in his soul, harnesses for strength he would need.

'What do we do now?' he said to her, though he was speaking to himself as much as to his ...

Girlfriend? Lover? The map for relationships between a boy his age and a girl was drawn in stone, the progressions simple and inevitable. There was nothing complicated about adolescent romance, the game was played to a set of rules understood by all who took part.

But he no more felt like an adolescent boy than he did an aged retiree. For as long as he could remember, even when his mother had been in Pescadero, he had felt like a man, and had been marked by the others his age as unusual for that very reason. He had seen too much, been told too much, experienced too much for adolescence to be anything more than a lonely fantasy when he yearned sometimes for the normality denied him.

So what did the map lay down for their future? What roads to follow or points to aim for? He supposed he should aim for whatever variant of happiness he could hew from the rocks that had just fallen between himself and his mother, than he should aim for what he had said in his fury to be the reason for his actions, but he had provoked that dreadful confrontation from instinct about what was right, about what he needed. Everything he had said had been true, everything he had said he had felt to be certain, but it had all been said in a rush of blood and power from within which had previously lain idle.

He looked for an answer from within, but received one from her.

'I have no reference for what we do now,' she replied softly. 'Before I was sent back, you told me something. You told me that there was no fate but what we make for ourselves. My fate is to be with you, and your fate is to be with me. With that as a given, what do you want to do know?'

_No fate but what we make for ourselves,_ he thought. His future self had said that to his father as a message to his mother, but he believed now that he had meant it differently from the way his mother had always believed. She had thought it to be a licence to try to change the future; she had said that the future was not written in stone, that even Kyle had said to her that the grim future from which he had been sent was merely one that could result from the billions of choices made every second. He believed that it was meant that whatever choices made should be from alternatives immediately apparent, not always with one eye on Judgement Day.

So, what did he want to do now?

He laughed quietly.

'What is funny?' she demanded, her head moving to the side as it always did when she encountered something she did not fully understand.

'All I really want to do now is sleep,' he told her honestly. Even before she had woken, he had been tired. The recent events had left him feeling more than simply exhausted; it was as though he had drained the last reserves of energy he had.

'Oh,' she replied, understanding. 'Do you want me to sleep with you? I think that is the next stage of relationship development.'

On another day, he would have swallowed heavily, the blood rushing to his head and other areas at the very thought of lying beneath his blankets in his underwear with Cameron at his side in hers. He had thought about it endlessly in the days that she had been healing, had considered what it would be like to sleep next to her, to hold her, to explore her. To see just how different she was, to see what difference it would make to a woman to be a machine, or whether there was any real difference. To fulfil all his desires. He would have nodded dumbly, taken her hand, and led her to his bedroom, and waited to see what happened then.

'I would like that,' he replied simply. He was too tired, and what had happened between them and between his mother and uncle, was too important for the quick fulfilment of any simple fantasy. If he was to have a relationship with her, if he was to justify the rigid stance he had taken with his uncle's hatred and his mother's furious incomprehension, then it was the simple things they would have to ensure were right. The complicated would look after itself, on instinct.

John's dreams were usually dark, violent and oppressive. He often woke in a cold sweat, struggling to remember what had caused him to shout, or made him believe in the darkness that he was not alone, that across the room were a set of glowing red eyes with one purpose against which he could not alone defend. If it was not the image he received from his mother of the original T-800 series, chasing him as a boy through alleyways that never ended, as he tired and it continued with its remorseless purpose, it was the T-1000. Changing and melting, becoming those he loved dearest as often as it retained the shape he despised. If it was not them, it was the failing nuclear rain, the flames of the explosions and the black ashes and bones it left behind. Sometimes, it was a blank face, staring with sightless eyes that denoted not blindness but purpose in the absence of other considerations. That one was the worst, for when remembered it he knew that it was his mind struggling to put a face to Skynet itself, as though it needed one. He often woke without breath, shivering in the height of summer, and often in tears whose origin was shrouded in terror that would not surface through his conscious mind.

He did not recall having a pleasant dream, the kind to which most people were used, of smiling children and green meadows, of winning the lottery or vacations in the Caribbean in the company of a supermodel or an actress. Some of them began that way, he knew, but they ended in fire and blood. They ended with the sun falling beneath a distant, red horizon from which it would never again rise. He often wondered if the reason he found it so easy to summon courage in the waking world was because he had a reference for real terror in dreams that rendered anything that actually happened pale and colourless by comparison.

He knew that it was that sort of strength that his mother admired, and it was for that kind of mindless courage that he had been raised. Maybe, he wondered in the few seconds between waking and opening his eyes to sun streaming in through the window and welcoming the healthy noise of a city populated by people and not a singular machine intelligence, it was for that reason that his mother so vehemently insisted that he have nothing to do with his desires. That, for him, such desires would serve only to weaken.

As he turned his head, seeing Cameron lying beside him, he knew that there was more than one source of strength.

He had never slept with a woman before; he had never even come close. There had been girls at school who had been attracted to the 'bad boy' image that that was inherent to his insecurities and not affected, but he had been too young for anything to ever come of it. She was the first woman with whom he had slept.

'Good morning,' he said gently, brushing a strand of hair from the side of her head and leaning in, kissing her softly on the lips.

'Good morning, John,' she replied, equally quietly. He assumed that it had been a first for her, also.

They had not done anything as they – or, rather, as he – prepared to sleep.

He had been barely conscious, the sudden exhaustion he had felt magnified ten times when he had seen his bed. He had removed his clothes down to his underwear, and put on a crumpled white T-shirt in which he always slept. She had removed her clothing down to her underwear and bra, and then put on a shirt similar to his. She had met his eyes, and smiled, very slightly.

'_I don't know what to do now,' she told him with the same disarming honesty with she approached most things, tinged with uncharacteristic uncertainty he had only ever seen feigned when he had first met her. That had been the product of her mission; this was not. _

_He smiled. 'Pull back the cover,' he suggested._

_She obeyed, then looked back. 'Get onto the bed and pull back the cover over yourself. It's warm enough, so it doesn't have to be tight,' he told her. He wanted to laugh, but the moment was serious. He was unsure how she would react; were she an ordinary girl, it would be the worst thing that he could do, but were she an ordinary girl she would hesitate over such simple things._

_When she was beneath the covers, held just beneath her chest, she looked as innocent and vulnerable as anyone. It was so easy to forget what she actually was, he knew, and he was grateful for it. It was not that he ever really forgot, or ever really would; it was that there were so many other things perfect about her that it did not matter. _

_He took a deep breath, and slid beneath the covers himself. As he had told her, it was a warm night, though he knew that he would feel warm in this situation regardless of climate, and it was not sexual desire that was heating him, though of course that was present. It was a simple sense of fulfilment, of rightness, as the world had been tilted but had straightened itself so that life would continue as before. He had been unaware of any hole within himself beyond those that were obvious, but as he pulled the covers around himself, careful to leave her enough though he knew that she did not need them, it was though one was filled regardless._

'_What now?' she whispered to him as he turned to put out the light. The room was turned to darkness, other than the soft light of the streetlamps filtering through the thin curtains, giving what could be seen a golden sheen that he considered appropriate. _

_There were so many things that he could say, so many things that he could suggest, so many things that he could simply do. She would be receptive to any suggestion, he knew, or even any order he gave, though that was something that he could never do; it would be an unforgiveable act of twisted manipulation. He had noticed that she had asked him for orders when she had held Derek to the point of permanently ruining his arm, and did not yet know the significance of that; he would ask her when he could concentrate. At that moment, he mind was a jumble of impressions, impulses and distractions, make worse by her close proximity. _

_In the same bed as him, underneath the same covers as him, waiting for simple instruction._

_He leaned over, and kissed her deeply, allowing what little of his passion was left through his exhaustion to spend itself. She responded with equal enthusiasm, her hands first around his back with strength that was ten times his, then on his head, then cupped around his face, where his ended up. He would feel nothing else, not tonight, nor allow her to do so were she to volunteer. It was not the night for that. There were so many other things he realised that he enjoyed about her than simply her irresistible beauty. Though he would not lie to himself and pretend that it was insignificant._

_He pulled away from the kiss, but remained in her arms, half leaning into her as her brown hair was spread in a fan shape on the pillow. She stared back at him, innocence where design dictated malice, purity where her creator had designed corruption. He shrugged mentally; God had designed humans for purity, if one believed the legends, but they had hurled it back into the face of His generosity. Maybe, in that bed, at that moment, there was balance. _

_The silence was pregnant, but he could not bring himself to break it. In that moment, when all the darkness allowed him to see was the golden reflection from the skin of her face, accentuating the depth of her eyes and the guilelessness of her expression, he was happy._

'_Now, we sleep,' he told her eventually. 'Or I sleep, and you try. In about eight hours, I'll wake up, and we'll talk.' He moved his hand across her cheek, and leaned down, kissing her forehead. 'We have a lot to talk about.'_

_She frowned slightly. 'I thought that it is normal for a man and a woman in this situation to have sexual relations.' She was silent for a moment, then asked hesitantly. 'Do you not desire me in that manner?'_

_He smiled. 'Very much,' he replied. 'But tonight, I'm very tired. Not only that, but I want to see what it is like just to sleep in your arms. Despite what TV might have told you, that's actually the way couples sleep most of the time. Sex is less frequent than simply enjoying the presence of another person so near you. That's all that I want tonight. As for other nights ... we can talk tomorrow. Goodnight, Cameron.'_

'_Goodnight, John,' she replied. 'I love you.' _

_He said nothing for a moment, thinking about the certainty with which she had told him that, and the lightness in his soul he suddenly felt when he heard it._

_He turned to her, and took her in his arms, his head touching hers. He had never felt so comfortable, or so safe._

'_Goodnight, Cam,' he replied. 'I love you, too.'_

'Did you sleep well?' she asked seriously. He knew that she would be taking a great many simple things seriously in the coming days and weeks. What was obvious to most was alien to her, regardless of her programming, and her adaptability would be sorely tested. He knew that she did not ask the question because she did not know the answer; she did not sleep, he knew, and knew too that she most likely remained awake, watching him as he slept. He smiled at her, and pulled her close.

He would have been lying to himself if, in that kiss, he told himself that there was not more at that moment he wanted; he wanted a great deal more, and not even the smallest part of that desire was mere satisfaction. To be together physically was, to him in that moment as they kissed for the third time, an expression of what he felt and, he hoped, of what she felt. There was more exploration to be done with regard to those feelings and what they meant before matters progressed.

The fact that his mother was in the next room, most likely awake all night and seething, bothered him not at all, not after last night, not after the snarling of whatever wolf rested next to his soul, waiting for the moment to be woken, to strike.

'Better than I ever have before,' he answered honestly when they finished. He held her head in his hands, cradling it from the back, leaning across her. 'I'm sorry you can't,' he whispered. That was one barrier they couldn't surmount.

'I shut down all unnecessary systems, subject to mission priorities,' she replied. 'I considered many things. I watched you sleep. I contemplated what happened yesterday evening, what you said and what you did. I analysed how, when in school, we can interact, as we are supposed to be brother and sister. I arrived at many answers. I spent the night well. I look forward to more.'

He laughed quietly, stretching idly. 'So do I. What day is it today?' He could have figured it out; he had lost track of the days since she had been injured, but he loved hearing her talk.

'Sunday,' she told him. 'The day of rest,' she added.

He stretched again. He did not remember feeling so rested, and had no desire for more. He had not spent a simple day, enjoying what life had to offer, in longer than he could ... No, he could not remember ever having spent a day like that. When he had been a boy, he had been shuttled from one location to another, always in search of more equipment, more instruction, more men who could make him into what he needed to be. When a youth, when his mother had been sent to Pescadero, he had spent his time in bitter resentment at the revelation to him by the authorities of what they believed to be the reasoned truth, which in his youthful naivety he had accepted, and which had driven him to rebellion and worse. Since the events of 1997, he had spent his time worrying that the normality himself had his mother had attained was a fleeting break between past conflict and future tragedy, which it had been in a manner which even he could not have predicted.

There was no difference between today and any other day since they had arrived in 2008; Skynet's genesis was still waiting for its moment, those who would seek to profit from what they did not, and could not, understand still waited in the long grass, ready to strike, ready to kill. His mother resented him, his uncle hated him. But beside him now lay one thing ... one _person_ ... whose very presence and closeness to him in the bed and outside it made everything grim seem light. He wanted to have one day, just one simple day, when the worries that preoccupied him were relegated to a distant priority, in favour of simpler things. A walk on the seafront, maybe, a coffee in Starbucks. A movie, some popcorn. Simplicity and easy predictability were luxuries he had never experienced, on which he could not put a price, for he nothing against which to compare them. Today, he thought to himself, he would find out.

He would spend today with Cameron, and damn what all others thought. He didn't care what was beneath her skin, or behind her eyes, and he cared not at all for what others thought, not now.

_Eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow, we die._

He smiled.

'What?' she asked, not releasing as him, as though to do so would be for yesterday to disappear and what was between them to mutate from relaxed companionship and love to the previously stilted relationship of frustrated object and soulless guardian. He did not know if any of that went through her mind, but he would have liked to think that it did.

'Would you like to go for a walk?'

She smiled, with that same hesitation she had displayed since yesterday and he had never seen before that. 'I think I would like that,' she told him.

His mother was sitting at the table, a cup of black coffee in front of her, untouched. She was staring at it, as though the answers to every mystery – the obvious one included – was contained within it. Some, he knew, believed that coffee had exactly that kind of power.

Derek stood behind her, staring out the window, his gun tucked into his belt to the front. They both wore the same clothes they had the previous night, he noticed, and they were not rumpled from sleep. If the deep black beneath Derek's eyes and his mother's more familiar leaden pose on the chair did not tell him that neither had slept, as he entered the room with Cameron's hand in his, that would.

He had showered while Cameron had changed; he knew that she seldom needed to shower, though he had been for a moment tempted to ask her to join him. It would be premature, though he was sorely inclined regardless to ask. She would interpret it, however, as a demand, or an order, and he would not do that to her. He could not remotely claim to be an expert; in many ways, he was treading as softly as was she. But he knew that what he had revealed of himself the previous night, that dreadful certainty and willingness to go as far as necessary in pursuit of what he knew to be right, would mean that she would follow any lead he offered. Nothing, he vowed to himself then, would happen between them until she initiated it, and until he was sure that she meant it. He could owe her nothing less.

'Good morning,' he said to them brightly. Let them think what they want; he needed their skills and their bravery. He did not need their approval, which was just as well, because he knew he would never get it, and found that he did not care.

His mother lifted her head from her deep contemplation of her coffee, and Derek turned. Their expressions were identical as they saw himself and Cameron enter the kitchen, hand in hand, mingled disgust, disappointment, and fear.

'Are you going to kill me now?' his mother asked in a dead monotone.

John squeezed Cameron's hand and then let it go. He sighed.

'No, Mom, I'm not going to kill you now,' he told her. 'I was angry when I said those things, angrier than I've been in a long time. You kept me safe all these years, made into what I needed to become, made me become it. I have so many reasons to be grateful to you that I've lost count.' He glanced at Derek, who was staring at with cold hostility. 'And to you.'

Sarah said nothing as she looked at him over her cold coffee. At length, she looked at Cameron, who was staring at her from behind John. 'You've achieved your mission, haven't you?' she asked softly, surprisingly without a hint of hostility, but rather simple resignation. 'You've compromised the one man who could stop the machines. You've managed to kill the resistance without ever firing a shot. Who will ever follow him if he's sleeping with a machine?'

'They will follow him because they have no choice,' Cameron replied in a clear, serious voice. 'They will follow him because he is the only chance they have against Skynet. And if we achieve our mission here, the question will not have to arise. If we can stop Skynet here, it will never have to happen. Is that not still what you want, Sarah Connor?'

Sarah stared at her, the logic irrefutable. Stopping Skynet here was still exactly what she wanted, for which she was willing to sacrifice almost anything, even her son if necessary. She had grown cold over the years since Kyle's death, unfeeling, sublimating all healthy urges and drives into a single goal; the survival of the species. Whatever God had thrust that most unwanted role onto her was a vindictive deity, but it was a role she embraced, and one for which she would brook no distraction.

The machine was right. Stopping Skynet here was what counted. Let the future, for once, look after itself. When that was achieved and Judgement Day permanently thwarted, then she would take care of the machine, one way or another. Until that day, she needed John to find the Turk.

She loved her son still, she couldn't but after all the years, but that look in his eyes the previous night when he had threatened to kill her, and meant every word of it, when he had chose the machine over his own flesh and blood, removed any vestige of affection she had for him. It had not been her John who had threatened her; it had been Cameron's, and Derek's, the John that she had thought she was never destined to meet. She would have been glad not to.

It was her own irony, she knew, that she had spent all that time, all that effort, made all those sacrifices, to make John into what he had become, without ever wanting to see the result of her efforts. That it had taken the machine to make him into what he needed to be, what he hopefully would never have to be.

She could not forget the look in his eyes; she would take it with her to the grave. But, still, she needed him. Stopping Skynet overrode everything else.

She turned to Derek. 'We need to stop Skynet,' she told him. 'Can you live with this until then?'

He stared daggers at Cameron, then at John. 'I've lived with worse betrayals,' he told her quietly. 'Connor is the single worst bastard I ever met. I hoped that by being here I could change him, but I see that something else got to him first. You hear me, Connor?' he spoke then to John, who sat quietly with Cameron's hand on his shoulder. 'You're the worst bastard in the whole of TechCom. You always were. You never gave a 

toss for anything except stopping the machines, never cared about anyone. So I guess it makes sense that, never caring about anyone, you care now about a machine. The two of you are well-matched, at least.'

John looked at Derek and saw the hatred there. He looked back at Cameron and saw something else.

'I suppose we are,' he said softly. 'Shall we go for that walk?'

She smiled. 'Let's.'


	5. Chapter 5

Many years later, Cameron was encouraged to write about her earliest experiences, as a way of processing them properly, and to record for the posterity of those interested in such fascinating and dangerous times. She thought a great deal about where to begin such a record, wondering whether it was best to begin like David Copperfield, at the very beginning, at her genesis, if not birth, but cast aside such an idea as impractical. Some would be interested at what she had seen the first time she opened her eyes, but not many; the story had been told often enough, with legends increasing with repetition. She thought it best not to disabuse people of the romanticized version they cherished over the mundane truth.

Sitting beside the keyboard, she brushed the brown hair from her face, and turned off the light she did not need to see. This, she thought, was better done in darkness. Her beginnings were dark enough, she remembered.

I suppose that my real beginning – the moment when I became Cameron, and not a TOK 715 model with that designation used to facilitate integration – was when John cried on my shoulder on the 25th of April, 2008, at 23.47. I had been constructed more than year before in linear time, and my memories included six months and seven days in Bunker 17 in Los Angeles, but those memories were like shadows beside the real awareness I was now allowed. Skynet infiltration and termination units _are_ self-aware, but true sentience is limited to the parameters of their pre-programmed mission. Unless the CPU is switched to full read/write mode – which is rare and very dangerous for either Skynet or the Resistance – the model may only interpret what facts it sees and what variables it encounters within the strict limitation of its purpose. For example, when I told Sarah Connor that my reactions to John could be called 'love' by her definition, it was true, but it was a statement made within the context of the confrontation between them. At that time, I had no idea what love meant, beyond the definition. When we had first kissed, moments before that, it was the first beginnings of emergence, but my programming was still fully in control.

The John Connor with whom I was familiar – the Connor who was a ruthless and dedicated leader of the human armies against those of Skynet – was beginning to emerge at that moment. It was evident in his actions, even in his stance, and the singular willingness he displayed to stand up to his mother and his uncle. His future self had anticipated this awakening – I know far more now than I did then, for obvious reasons – and had anticipated that this emergence could not be allowed to develop without guidance. He had seen soldiers, even full field commanders, develop a form of insanity with their single-minded will to destroy the machines, beside which all else was irrelevant. He once described to me a precedent for this behavior; that of the Waffen SS _Totenkopfverbande_ Division, the troops who had been assigned the duty of the genocide perpetuated by the Nazi regime. He said that those men, as the result of the actions they undertook every day, lost any commonality they had with the rest of humanity, their insanity an insidious warping of their reality around a concept which was alien to most others. That they had incorporated a dreadful duty into their awareness, which had become, to all intents and purposes, inhuman. John was afraid that such a thing would happen to him, that such hatred as he felt would come to dominate him to the point that, even in the event of victory, the hatred would not dissipate. He could feel its advent; when I was developed by TechCom, he saw an opportunity to prevent it.

However, this is not to say that I was programmed to love John as he was as a boy; this would be unfair. The elder John knew that, if his younger self realized this, the purpose would be defeated. As a result, my chip was set to read/write, but only at a certain moment. A program was written, and classified in a root directory, only to be accessed within the parameters of a judgment algorithm which was specifically written for the purpose and would only activate when certain conditions were met. The elder John did not know what those precise conditions would be, but he knew that they would develop. When the program was accessed, at the moment when John was removing my bandages after the attack on the jeep and the explosion which had incapacitated me, it took some time for the freedom allowed me to be incorporated into my base programming, and some time for the accompanying emotions to be fully understood.

I am unsure to this day what are the substantial differences between my own emotions and those of humans; after much discussion, I have concluded that the difference is one of origin and mechanics, not effect. The love I felt for John when my CPU was allowed the freedom to act on its own initiative was very real, at least to me. I would describe it best as an inability to consider my own existence as independent of his. This would seem similar to the basic protective drive which had been programmed into previous models, but their existence was determined by his physical survival. My concern was more with the entirety of his being – his soul, for want of a better term – and I was from that moment unable to consider my own existence without him, as a person, with me. Additionally, and confusingly, I was from that moment unable to consider my life – and by this time, short though it was, I was considering my _life_ and not merely my _existence_ – as meaningful unless John returned those feelings. In short, what humans consider love to be – the sublimation of self with a framework of lifetime companionship, the primal hurt that would be felt at its absence, or its lack of reciprocation, the fury which would be felt at its betrayal, the 

consideration of every action within that framework – was something I felt from that moment. I have since felt other things – anger, fear, joy, happiness and, of course, real hatred, but it began with love. I also understood that true freedom would consist of the possibility of my feelings about John changing later, that I might cease to love him, but that was a risk that the elder Connor was evidently ready to take.

The first night we spent together was sublime, though we were not sexually active at that point. I remember the apprehension I felt at the prospect of spending a night with the object of my new affections, and desires, wondering what would come of it. I was not worried about any activities we would pursue; as all models, I was fully functional and knew well that I could perform any action normally undertaken by a human female. Rather, I was nervous about the consequences of any such activity, whether they would change my feelings towards John or, far worse, his about me. I had also never spent a night in a bed, and had no real idea of how to go about doing so. John's instruction was gentle, and helpful, but when he kissed me as I lay beside him, I experienced what could only be described as nervousness. Nor were physical feelings denied me; that was a peculiarity of my model, deliberately designed. The drives that I felt at that moment would have been enough to overload my system had I felt them the previous day, but the previous day I would have interpreted them in the cold light of reason. Reasonable, however, is not how I would describe my thought processes at that point. I thought, in fact I had expected, that we would make love, and the prospect terrified me, less because of my knowledge of the mechanics of the action, which was extensive, but rather because of the potential for things between us, fragile and new as they were, to change. I was worried at the possibility of something, of _anything,_ going wrong. I need not have worried; John told me later that he was just as nervous.

I could not sleep, but I was able to shut down most of my systems in contemplation of these new, and very real, sensations. Rather than reach conclusions in the fastest and most expedient manner possible, I deliberately slowed down my processing speed to a fraction of its potential, that I was able to consider these shattering revelations and freedoms at a leisure that was almost human. The night passed quickly, nevertheless. I spent most of it on my side in that small bed – which in later years would come to seem a luxury – watching John as he slept, as he breathed, and as he dreamed. Through the programming freedom allowed me – to rewrite my own base code as I saw fit in light of my feelings - I was able to interpret what I felt within parameters of future actions. In other words, I was able to anticipate what the feelings I had would mean in practice. I found my body performing small actions which I had not ordered; on three occasions, I brushed his hair away from his face as he slept. I could see no reason to do this; indeed, I had not ordered myself to do so. It was an involuntary action, the first of many.

We left the house that morning, after a conversation with Sarah Connor and Derek Reese, in which the former expressed her anger and disgust, and the latter his hatred, which I remembered well from my time in Bunker 17. He described John as 'the worst bastard in the whole of TechCom,' which was an accurate description, but it was one which, I hoped, was slightly inaccurate. It was that very fate I sent back to prevent; it was that very fate it was my honor and my joyful privilege to at least ameliorate. John would still become, as Derek described him, a bastard, but he would become one who would have me beside him at all times. With me these, and with his feelings for me and mine for him very real, he would have something against which he could put his hatred into perspective. Derek maintained that he had hoped to divert John from the path he was destined to walk, but that had never been his mission. That had been mine, and in being given this mission I had been given a gift greater, I believe, than any given to anyone.

Our first 'date,' I suppose one might call it, was in a café at the local shopping mall. We sat opposite each other as John ordered a triple espresso for himself and a cappuccino for me, though I was unsure about this choice. I can digest small amounts for the purpose of assimilation; the remnants are incinerated in a small chamber located in my abdominal area, but up until that moment I believed that I could not 'taste,' as humans do. That cappuccino was the first thing I ever 'tasted;' I miss them now. I had many more on our subsequent dates. I found I liked the creamy heat as it touched my tongue, the sweetness of the chocolate, the odour. These sensations were all new to me, at the time; my programming was rewriting itself to incorporate the freedoms allowed to me, and one part of the base rewrite was obviously undertaken with the presumption that to feel as I did, and for John to feel about me as he did, would require me to appreciate all things in as human a manner as possible.

I miss cappuccinos.

We said nothing for a few moments; John was watching the other people pass, spending their Sunday in relaxation; I was watching for threats. That was something I realised then and confirmed later that would not change; I would always look for threats to John, though less because it was a mission priority – it still was – than because I could not contemplate what it would mean for me were something to happen to him. This was the selfish aspect of love, but I found I enjoyed it. It was typically human and, though I could never be human and did not desire to be – I was not Pinocchio, who missed the point – I could see the purpose of such selfishness.

'When I was moving around all those years,' he began, looking at me with what I believed was hesitation, 'I never thought that I'd be happy, you know? I mean, happiness was something I saw on TV, or sometimes when other people acted a certain way. To me, everything was either about the mission, or hating the mission, or staying alive or Mom staying alive. There was never any time for anything else. The last thing I ever expected was to be happy. I got a glimpse of it when Mom was with Charlie, kind of, but even then I somehow knew that it wouldn't last. It was like God, or something, or whatever was controlling things, never meant for me to be happy, I was just meant to be cold, and focused, and full of hate and anger. The machines made me that way, before they ever even rose. When they sent the Terminators back, they made me that way. It's a bit ironic that it took a machine to make me happy, even if it's only for a while.'

I didn't really know what to say. Had be asked me the day before what happiness was, I would have been only able to quote what was the definition, without when saying it appreciating its meaning beyond the deusions it fed in humans. But I would not have understood those delusions to be emotional manifestations of objective states. To put it simply, I would have had no frame of reference; now I did. I could remember the deadness within me, like one can remember the darkness of a bunker only as something to be dreaded when emerging into the full sunlight. I had no wish to return to that lack of illumination; I knew what it was to be happy. I knew what it was to enjoy the light.

'I'm happy, John,' I told him; I could say nothing else. 'At least, I think I am. I have never felt like this, my model or other models were never designed for this. But you make me happy; I'm certain of it. I can remember what it was like before yesterday, before my programming was opened up.'

I explained to him then what I have outlined above, the way in which my second mission priority was allowed to dominate the others in a manner that left them in the shadows, lurking but reluctant to emerge into the brightness of my feelings for John, knowing that they could not compete.

He looked at me, then leaned across and kissed me deeply. The physical sensations I have described above had been, by this stage, incorporated into my base programming, and I was able to interpret them rather than allow them to enslave me as I had before. My interpretation, I believed then and know now, was little different from that of a human female in the same position. I knew what the kiss meant, what it signified and, more, how it made me _feel._ It was strange to be able to say that to myself, most strange that my programming had allowed these feelings to be incorporated, but it was not surprising. My reprogramming, as I have said, was a masterwork.

'It was only when I thought I'd lost you that I realised how I felt myself,' he told me when we had finished; we had attracted a few glances with the intensity of our exchange. None were threatening. 'It's surprising what that kind of thing can do, how it can change a person. I didn't really think of you that way before, but I didn't really think of you as a machine either. It's all weird,' he finished with a half smile.

His face became more sombre then. 'I don't know what the hell I'm going to about Mom.' He looked at me expectantly, as though he believed that I could supply him with an answer.

I could not; Sarah Connor was long dead by the time my memories began. I had heard the legends, magnified with every telling, but they had not approximated the truth. She had been deified by TechCom as the woman who had, in effect, formed the Resistance before the need for it was evident, the woman who had taught her son to fight, to prepare, to strategise and, most of all, to hate. John Connor, I knew, did not share those illusions or join in the posthumous worship, though he allowed the tales to spread. I know now, or think I know now if the timeline has not significantly changed as the result of my actions, that John Connor had little affection for his mother beyond a sense of gratitude, that he was not fond of her and shared little of that adoration shared by most of his subordinates. It had been Derek Reese who had spread those tales, not John Connor. But I could not tell John that, not at that point. To tell him too much would have the consequence of diverting his actions from their spontaneous, reactive necessity. Knowing too much of what was to come would mean that he might seek to avoid it; I think that was one of the main reasons that I was sent back. To ensure that he retained his humanity, of course, but also to ensure that he was not taken over completely by his mother's hatred and violent pre-occupations. The destruction of Skynet was a necessity, but it I do not believe that John Connor – the one who sent me back as opposed to the one with whom I have spent all these years – wanted his younger self to be so single-minded. A general, above all, needs perspective; one riddled with hatred and fury will focus to profoundly on the simple goal of victory that he will not stop to think what might be the price of that triumph. Sarah Connor, I knew, would not understand that, and her failure to comprehend everything required by a man who would have the salvation of humanity as the testament to his life was a failure for which she had already condemned herself by his rejection.

Save where John is concerned, to this day I do not see the point of sympathy. Sarah Connor had laboured for long enough under her singular focus to endure the costs of her lack of vision; my only concern was how John felt.

'John, I do not see that she has a choice but to accept this, to accept _us_,' I told him. 'What can she do? She will not kill you, and she cannot kill me. She needs us both to destroy Skynet; it is that to which she has dedicated her life.'

'I know,' he replied softly. 'I some ways, I think that is the only reason that she is so protective; she sees me as a tool to achieve what she thinks cannot be achieved without me. It's weird; she's the mother of the future, but it's a future that she wants to avoid. Sometimes I think that my life's been bad, but hers was torture.' He straightened his shoulders then; that means resolution in him, I knew. 'But you're right. She can't do anything about us. This – us – was meant to be. I really, deeply, believe that. There is no way that I could feel this way, not with the crap I was raised with, and think that it's just a passing thing. I mean, I always knew that my life was set out for me, you know? There was never, never meant to be, I suppose, anything else except for the war. It's as if there was never any room for anything else. The war was everything. How to fight it, how to win it, was everything. I mean, there was a year or so, when Mom was in Pescadero, that I had a bit of normality, but even then I knew it wouldn't last.'

I finished my cappuccino, savoring the taste. It was less than romantic to know that, as I did so, it was being vaporized at 900° Kelvin, but there are things about my nature that I cannot change.

I stood – John looked up at me, an expression in his face I later learned was hope; I saw it seldom enough, less and less as the years progressed, to treasure it when I did, though I did not then appreciate the unique wonder of it, occasioned by infrequency. Later, when his eyes are cold, and hardened by years of loss and rage, I still treasure the first time I saw that expression on his face. It reminds me of what, and who, I first loved, the only person or the only thing I have ever loved.

That, and the flower.

He bought it for me on the way back to the house. The sun was slowly setting, a red light on the horizon as the voices on the side street faded to murmurs in appreciation of a sunset the likes of which that part of California had not often witnessed, and would not again in my lifetime, at least.

There was a small shop on the corner, one of those establishments that briefly flowered the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, that catered more for immigrants than natives, but was characterized by the warmth of the proprietor, which I did not appreciate then but do, now, with its loss to the machines and the night that occupies day.

John had little money with him; Sarah was ever tight fisted with cash, understandable thought that attitude was. We passed the shop, with its signs in Spanish and English, neither of which were grammatically correct. He kissed me on the cheek.

'Wait here,' he whispered, squeezing my hand and relinquishing it.

I was reluctant to allow him out of my sight, even for a moment, less because of my new feelings than the imperative of my first priority which had only been emphasized by this pre-programmed change, but I also understood, if dimly, that he would never be happy, and thus nor would I, were he not to have a simulation of normality in the one relationship with which he seemed comfortable. It was inexplicable to me, but that normality was something after which I also lusted.

Love is most strange.

He emerged from the shop as the sun finally set, casting its last rays over the distant horizon, as some turned to watch, couples mostly, their arms around each other or holding each others' hands in unconscious display of a feeling without which I could not tolerate my life, so totally has it come to dominate every action and desire.

There was a small rose in his hand, drooping over the stem. He handed it to me, nervously; I accepted it, with equal hesitation. I knew from my database, and my many nights without sleep, what a red rose signified; I was not so ignorant. But knowing what it meant and being the one to accept it was the difference between reading about Paris and visiting Notre Dame.

I saw Paris once, seven months later. Knowing that it was founded by the Parisii on what is now the Ile de la Cité as staging post for traffic from Italy to the northern coast of Europe did not prepare me for the Fall leaves on the Champs Elysées.

I have kept that flower to this day, pressed and dried, of course. I still feel it, sometimes, when the HKs fly flew overhead with their tracer shots and their amplified mag lamps. When the T-1000s came off the line, and hundreds died. Watching the sky fall and the missiles rain, I reached into my pocket and felt that flower.

When Skynet died screaming its digital terror, that flower was with me. As John was with me.

'I want to be with you, John,' I whispered to him when he handed me the rose. 'I want you beside me, I want to be close to you. I love you, John Connor.'

Our first night together, the first time we were together, the first time we made love, was rapturous.

I could describe it perfectly, if I wished; my memory of it is completely intact. But I will not; it would be a violation of what was, for both myself and John, a perfect moment, only to be shared between ourselves.

Sarah was awake, Derek dozing in front of the television. It was a mark of John's indifference that he led me to the bedroom in front of his mother without even bothering to defiantly acknowledge her condemnation. By then, even by then, he knew that there was no reason. What justification did he require? Even generals need happiness, even they, more than most.

When we were finished, when we were finally finished, when the first rays of the new sun were piercing the thin curtains, when we both laughed together, he with that same expression of complete devotion I see every day, I with a genuine appreciation of absurdity and the irony of fate that I would not have previously understood, we lay together, side my side, touching.

'I will face whatever my future is with you,' he told me quietly. 'I only want to face it with you.'

'And I with you,' I replied, meaning every syllable. 'I love you, John Connor.'


End file.
